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How Ronald Reagan Changed Bruce Springsteen’s Politics

Born in the U.S.A., which turns 30 this week, is Bruce Springsteen’s best-selling album to date, and that should come as no surprise. Its songs—“I’m On Fire,” “Glory Days,” “Darlington County” and others—are FM radio staples, their foursquare drum, piano, base and guitar parts perfectly at home in either a Jersey Shore bar or an East Texas roadhouse. If you hear a Springsteen song at your local supermarket, nine times out of 10 it comes from this album.

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Born in the U.S.A. is also the Springsteen album whose songs have had the longest half-life in U.S. political discourse, from President Ronald Reagan’s attempt to co-opt Springsteen’s popularity right after the album’s release to John Kerry’s ploddingly literal use of “No Surrender” in his presidential campaign 20 years later. Even Barack Obama, probably the most broadly appreciative music fan ever to occupy the Oval Office, chose a Born in the U.S.A. track (“I’m On Fire”) for a 2008 playlist of favorite songs.

But the greatest political impact of Born in the U.S.A. was undeniably on Springsteen himself—turning him from a relatively apolitical performer from an avowedly working-class background to a passionate advocate for the rights of the disenfranchised—and that was all thanks to Reagan.

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In 1984, President Reagan was running for his second term. Early on, his team had decided that the president’s core supporters would vote for him no matter what. The reelection campaign would therefore be more about wooing moderate and independent voters than about shoring up the committed Republican base. It would be about images rather than issues and would attempt to co-opt as much of mainstream U.S. culture as it could. If rock ‘n’ roll had been anathema to an earlier Republicans like former vice president Spiro Agnew—or even to then-current, musically clueless Secretary of the Interior James Watt—it was perfectly fine with most of the Reagan re-election team, particularly if the music in question could be viewed as inspirational. “If we allow any Democrat to claim optimism or idealism as his issue,” one adviser noted very early in the campaign’s planning, “we will lose the election.”

In late August, just after the Republican National Convention, conservative columnist—and unofficial Reagan campaign adviser—George Will attended a Springsteen concert in Largo, Maryland, and was highly impressed. “If all Americans,” Will would later write in his column about his backstage experience, “in labor and management, who make steel or cars or shoes or textiles—made their products with as much energy and confidence as Springsteen and his merry band make music, there would be no need for Congress to be thinking about protectionism.”

Perhaps significantly, Will’s fervent ode to the Springsteen work ethic did not appear until two weeks after the concert, when the presidential campaign was in full swing. Six days after the column appeared, President Reagan made a campaign appearance in Hammonton, New Jersey, and as usual his staff slipped a few local references into his standard stump speech. “America’s future,” Reagan told the small-town audience, “rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire—New Jersey’s own, Bruce Springsteen.”

WATCH: How Born in the U.S.A. Made Bruce Springsteen a Political Figure

When asked about the president’s compliment between concerts that week, Springsteen tried to shrug it off. But when you have the No. 2 album in the country, publicity tends not to go away. By the time the singer next took the stage, two days after the president’s Hammonton name check, it was clear that Springsteen would have to address it head-on and in the only place where he totally controlled the message: onstage. “Well, the president was mentioning my name in his speech the other day,” Springsteen told his Friday-night audience in Pittsburgh, “and I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must’ve been, you know? I don’t think it was the Nebraska album. I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.”

He then launched into “Johnny 99” from Nebraska, his last album before Born in the U.S.A.—much lower profile and much less “poppy.” It’s an austere set of songs about loners and criminals that Springsteen recorded himself in an empty rented house over a single night in the dead of winter. The song begins:

Well they closed down the auto plant in Mahwah late that month
Ralph went out lookin’ for a job but he couldn’t find none
He came home too drunk from mixin’
Tanqueray and wine
He got a gun shot a night clerk now they call ‘m Johnny 99.

This was a big change for Springsteen—one of the first times he had really acknowledged his songs’ political roots—perhaps even to himself.

Aside from a small fundraiser for George McGovern at a New Jersey drive-in in 1972, months before he even released his first album, Springsteen had never declared his support for a political candidate. In fact, he revealed in an interview published in December 1984 that he might only have voted once, perhaps in that election 12 years earlier.